#70 [The Anatomy of Melencholy] Robert Burton. This has been on my 'to read' list for a long time. It is a convoluted monster of a book with endless citations of authorities that no one but a scholar of Renaissance literature will have heard of. Burton has a great tendency to argue himself in circles, carefully presenting all sides of every discussion without really coming down firmly. It is interesting to see how much of what we think we know about how people thought in the seventeenth century is not accurate--for instance I did not know that the idea of the stars as suns in themselves was already prevalent. Not for everyone.

This book sat behind my chair after I had it bound, for forty years, and I read from it every few days. A great book, but a dipper: too dense to plow through, Latin quotations and all, but rewarding in pieces, like the Bible and, say, Gilbert White (Natural History of Selbourne). Originally one of he four "humors" like "Blood/ Sanguinary" that determine personality--"sanguine" being out-going, optimisic-- "Melancholy" or black bile broadens here to include what we call "psychology" or psychotropic disease, for instance, "love melancholy," which Freud placed squarely as the foundation stone of psychiatry--and now, arguably, results in crossing and transgressing gender. But Burton also reflects on the scholar's work, more poorly paid than "one who curls hair." Grand discussions, say, of whether fatty meat is unhealthy, or how to avoid heart problems. Constipation has a long chapter in Pt II, but Pt one has, halfway through, a long discussion of specific foods and their effects--sort of Master Chef meats Dr. Oz. "Generally, all such meats as are hard of digestion breed melancholy. Artaeus lib7 cap5 reckons up heads and feet, bowels, brains, marrow, fat, skins...They are rejected by Isaac, lib2.part.3...Milk, and all that comes of milk, as butter and cheese, curds, etc. increase melancholy (whey only excepted, which is most wholesome); some except asses' milk" (Vintage '77. p219). Burton begins with general observations: "The Turkes deride us, we them; Italians Frenchmen, accounting them light-headed fellows." He seems to relate the mind or soul to melancholy's effects here.The two other Galenic humors not so far mentioned are choleric and phlegmatic. Many law-enforement programs now focus on the choleric, and half of all TV-advertised medicines treat the phlegmatic. A general observation for our time: "Nimirum insanus paucis videatur:Maxima pars hominum morbo iactatur eodem." When all are crazy, who can distinguish the mad? ( )

The long and winding road or there and back again or Ode to Melancholy or:

Slips soft and curling....notes of music windlike silk caresses through my mindand eyes see far-flung placesmelted and meshed with faraway facesagain with inspiration bornof the breathless sigh that escapes my lips:Melancholy!I have come to know so well your enslaving blisshow you enchant my senses so that I existonly in the moment whenvivid dreams spun in timid hopeevaporate as mist-like motesabove the drowning watersof too intense desire:and my soul for one brief instant breathesthe fire of annihilating ecstasy.

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I write this melancholic whirlof thoughts and feelings tangled as the curlsof hair upon my headand fragile as the spider's webare my tears which slip,pearls of shining wistfulness,in silent trails along my cheekwhich longs to press against your coarseunshaven face, so tired and yetas enigmatic as if we had metjust yesterday.

Burton attempts to describe the causes and cures of melancholia, which today we label as depression. In the 17th century, human emotions were associated with various fluids in the body--a sanguine temperament with blood, a choleric temperament with an excess of bile. Melancholia was thought to arise from an excess of something called 'black' bile. As a physician, he describes a number of ways to overcome melancholy including the use of certain drugs. A monument to the author's erudition, the Anatomy contains a vast cabinet of recipes, stories, anecdotes, biographies and curiosa--enough to while away many an evening in front of the fire sipping a glass of old Port (a sure cure for melancholia!).

Robert Burton's The anatomy of melancholy, first completed in 1621, appears to be a medical work, but is described in the Tudor edition of 1927 by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (Tudor Publishing Company, New York) as 'a sort of literary cosmos, an omnium gatherum, a compendium of everything that caught the fancy of the scholar.. . abounding in quaint conceits, excerpts and quotations'. The 52-page index to the 984-page text reflects this anecdotal profusion.

Gentle Reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antic or personate actor this is, that so insolently intrudes upon this common theatre of the world's view, arrogating another man's name; whence he is, why he doth it, and what he hath to say.

One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton's spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today's readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries.